tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-63421312018-03-02T11:19:56.710-05:00Anagama WillThe continuing story of a father/husband/artist/caregiver.
All parts of this blog may be quoted, linked to, whatever so long as you give me credit for my words.W.D. Shirleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14961797718073179845noreply@blogger.comBlogger283125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6342131.post-64881909232087804842017-11-12T08:08:00.001-05:002017-11-12T08:08:51.511-05:00Squid LogicIt doesn’t seem to occur to most people that evolution is a process of life, so that so long as something is alive, it will evolve. Some animals evolved slowly compared to others, like the squid, because there has not been the sort of changes in the environment of the squid which caused the form of the squid to change. They lost their long spiral shell in some cases. We have no way to know what in their minds have evolved. Consider this: IF the mind is a product of the brain/body, AND the brain/body changes over time (evolves), THEN the mind will evolve over time. If there is more radiation coming through the layers of gas which encircle the globe, some animals may darken their skins to avoid cancers. Some may start to live in other environs. Some may simply die off.&nbsp; But dying off is a sort of change.<br />If, on the other hand, the mind is not a product of the brain/body, but is a separate field of energy connected with the body through the brain, then as the body changes over time, the connection will also be changed and so the mind will apparently change. A metaphor for this might be the communication systems we humans use. We could call to one another and in some cases we can make that call reach out fairly great distances. We cannot, however, pack much information into the sorts of calls which do this. So, we can use a telephone, and the old “licorice stick” enabled us to speak to another person to convey fairly complex ideas, although it would, from time to time, drop the call. Then we have the ubiquitous cell phone. Small enough to slip into a pocket or strap to your wrist, and powerful enough to have served nicely as the brains of a university of the 1960’s. This device allows you to speak to someone, and while speaking to them you might be showing them something, or sending them a document. As societal needs change the device has also changed, and previous versions do not always vanish but they might change their uses. A clunky old television might be the display for a modern fast moving video game.&nbsp; A blacksmith becomes a sword maker for people who like to wear costumes from the Middle Ages. Things change over time. People are things. Therefor people change over time.<br />Change is not linear by virtue of being different. A ball will roll east until the base changes and then it might roll west, but there is no reason that five changes down the line it will not be rolling east again. If a society changes from a monarchy to a democratic republic it might change into a personality cult evolving into a dictatorship, and from that to a socialist republic, a military dictatorship, or even a democracy is possible, all of which are determined not so much by what has been, but what is right now. There is no reason why a society based on intolerance and violence should abandon those virtues even if they are redefined into their opposites, as in “intolerance” becomes “protectionism, nationalism, patriotism” and “violence” becomes “defense”, so that the Department of War can be renamed the Department of Defense, even though it has never defended the nation, only attacked other nations. These attacks are always explained by changing the terms, evolving the message.<br />When we are told by our parent that we may not stay up late and watch a bloody monster movie, we ask “why?” and we are told, “Because...”, which begs the question to be repeated: “why?” and to which we are given the Final Answer: “Because I say so.” and the matter is closed, assuming we are smart enough. Some things are just Given. We are the way we are because, just because.<br />Having shed their mouths for beaks and increased the extent of their feathery covering, the animals who lived happily in the Jurassic Period continue to live here and now as happy as an animal can be whose domain is changing more rapidly than it can. Some of them have been changed by People, and we will likely continue to keep their forms until we can build a machine to produce something equivalent to their flesh to provide protein for our own bodies. We like fried chicken, and if we have to make the meat look like chicken when it comes out of the machine, then we will. Otherwise we will evolve to confess that we enjoy “fried chicken” and have no interest in it’s origins. In our own past we ate a great number of birds and fish and our floors were littered with these bones. Some of us learned to make whistles from bird bones and we would call out to the birds in their own language. When they came to investigate, we killed them and ate them. We learned a new way to lie. Calling in victims to kill them is very common nowadays, whistles are blowing constantly and people are leaping up and flying into the nets.<br />Squids kill whales. Whales have speech, size, experience, and still fall prey to 8 arms and a large beak. We find sores on whales showing how they fought back and won the battle against a squid. Some whales eat squid, and we empty their stomachs to find hundreds of 8 armed bodies. This relationship has been going on unchanged since before the meteor took out the last of the dinosaurs.<br />There is no reason to change that which works. There is no reason to retain that which no longer works. When a system no longer fits the situation, it must change in order to be retained. Lizards become snakes, large land animals become whales, and apes become human.<br />Change over time is what evolution means, and all living things change over time. To understand this, you need first to understand the limits of the time period involved. In the last one million years whales have been swimming along, singing and raising their young, but if we take in several million years we see that the animals on the shore who look like hippos are spending more time in the water to avoid predators than they spend out on land. To be able to swim better and faster they change over time the shape of their tail, they lose their arms and legs and develop a taste for plankton. The reason to change was to survive. When the meteor struck and the earth was shrouded in mist and smoke for months, the hippo-whales were under the waters eating plankton. They changed as the oceans changed, but for them the changes were minor. They got bigger, some grew longer teeth and began to eat bigger prey. On the surface of the earth small mammals become large mammals and little apes become larger, spear chucking predators. In time they throw their spears from boats to kill whales who dive to the bottom and come up when it is safe or their air is exhausted. The men wait in boats while the whales suddenly surge upwards from the waters, tossing men and boats into the air. As whales learned to eat squid, so whales have learned to attack men in boats. Meanwhile, on land, men in cars and trains are changing the living atmosphere of the planet to a form which will kill most of the life on the planet. Man is the only animal capable of such destruction. Take away man’s technology, leaving them with simple tools such as most animals use, and man becomes another ape, smaller than some and incapable of climbing trees using a tail. Monkeys have tails, apes have not.<br />Now apes in the form of man have traveled to the moon and left garbage and bags of feces. Those feces are riddled with life, bacteria and such. Left in the cold vacuum of the lunar landscape these life forms must either evolve or die. In time we may see the moon’s surface change color as bacteria adapt to almost no air, starkly cold and with no organic materials to consume. Our moon might change to red as the bacteria adapt to use silica rather than carbon, or some other unique adaptation. When we went to the moon and decided to leave our shit behind we assumed that nothing could live there, as we certainly could not. But one celled bacteria have different needs than humans, so there is really no logical reason to assume those bags of shit could not expand and populate the moon. It simply has not happened yet in our experiences, and that is because we did not have the capacity to travel to the moon. There is talk of firing our radioactive waste into the sun, because we assume such small amounts will have no impact. Yet history tells us how often we assume something to be true which is patently not. So we could cause the star which gives us life to change and that change could be unfriendly to our form of life, in which case things will change. Small additions can trigger large changes. A small spark can trigger a hydrogen bomb, which itself is a small spark when compared to the sun.<br />When man had hair all over its body and there were no cities or houses, as equals in a world of equals we changed very little over millions of years. We lost some hair and got slightly larger, probably from changing our diet to include more meat. Now as different apes we have little hair so we make clothes, we have no claws nor fangs, so we pick up sticks and throw stones. We build homes and live among groups of humans. We tell ourselves stories, like the whales, and lull ourselves into complacency in the quite mistaken belief that we are essentially different from the other apes and animals, somehow smarter, better and slated for success. This works in our present climate, but when the ice melts and the oceans rise we will have obvious evidence of our capacity for massive stupidity and a complete lack of understanding of the basic truths about life. What we have experienced in our own short lifetimes is believed to be the pattern from antiquity forwards into the foreseeable future. This is an error in logic. It assumes that which is not proven. Consider:<br />Bacteria are the dominant species on the planet. They have occupied the planet since the beginning of time and have evolved complex mechanisms to support their civilization.&nbsp; Over many generations the bacteria developed colonies containing billions of their kind, each adapted to their special duties. These colonies are mobile in order to seek more energy supplies and raw materials to maintain the colony. When two similar colonies meet they may briefly merge and one will develop a smaller colony which will grow in size until it must break away from the mother colony. Bacteria live in a state of conflict as other tribes of bacteria direct their colony to an assault on weaker colonies. The interesting thing to consider here is that these colonies have primitive self awareness and believe themselves to be sentient beings, not complex colonies of sentient beings. Since this mistaken understanding of the situation does no great harm normally to the bacteria, they allow it while they go about their business, growing and distributing chemicals and material around the colony. Occasionally the colony will “go bad” or become ill, and the bacteria may rampage the colony, destroying by changing the environment to that which is not conducive to bacterial life. Ambient conditions change and to this end bacteria must change or die. In most cases the colony will recover balance and the bacteria will continue, but eventually all colonies break up and disband, distributing the individual members throughout the immediate environment. Eventually some may find their way into a new colony and live there.<br />We, humans, like to think of ourselves as being unique and separate from the rest of the universe, as if there were an impenetrable barrier between ourselves and the universe. In actuality the best we have is a lacy substance which covers our colony: skin. Full of holes, pores and tears, our skin is not a barrier so much as a first stop. If we look deeper at the molecular level we see vast regions of empty space with the occasional flicker of substance in the form of atomic particles. Mostly we are fields of energy like much of what surrounds us. Life, therefore, is energy, and energy changes over time. The universe was once, we are told, a field of plasma and super charged electrons, quarks and bosons. It still is, but now it is colder and much of the energy has slowed down enough to quantum down into “matter”. We are some of this matter.<br />If I toss a rock into a pool of water a series of ripples will expand out in 3 dimensions, 4 dimensions and maybe even 5 or more. Actions have consequences. If I toss a piece of matter into a universe of energy small ripples of multi-dimensional energy move out into the universes. Existence has consequences. When waves of energy meet, they combine their amplitudes and energy begets energy. When matter meets matter in a full on impact some of the matter returns to energy and some of the matter changes form. When the energy that is a nation meets another nation’s energy, forms change and energy is converted. Consequences have consequences.<br />The whale was once a water rat big as a house. With few predators whales were able to swim out and around and tell their stories through thousands of miles of water. As it swam deeper the whales began to meet form unchanged through time: squid. The battle for supremacy of the deep waters has been going on for millions of years, and the squids have remained unchanged while the whales grew bigger, meaner or swam even further away. And while all this was going on, what were the plankton thinking?<br />For millions of years they have been taking in sunlight and exhaling oxygen, changing the atmosphere into something certain bacteria cannot abide. Now whales scoop them up by the billions, converting them into whale meat which attracts the squid and eventually mankind. The bones of the whales killed for their meat sit at the bottom of the deep waters and serve as housing and food for bacteria which moved to the bottom to avoid the deadly oxygen scourge.<br />On land the big mammals march along, led by a huge female and traveling to a place they cannot see but of which they have faith is still there and still has food and water. They follow their Great Mother in the way humanity did when it was traversing the savanna looking for water and food. When elephants walk past the bones of a dead elephant they stroke the bones lovingly with their trunks. They moan softly and perhaps remember better times. When a human walks past the bones of a dead human they become frightened and run away, terrified the bones might attack them, even the bones of their own mother, dead for years but there they are… Humans fear their dead and resent their young. Elephants revere their dead and adore their young. At no time will an elephant be tempted to kill a human and decorate their home with the body parts. At no time will humanity evolve the ability to swim to the deeper depths of the waters. The biggest squid have no fear of humanity and in spite of their opposable thumbs humans cannot match the squid for manipulation skills or deep thoughts. Squid have been pondering Life and the Universe since the whales were giant beavers and the elephants were tiny rodents. The fact that we do not speak their language is the result of our inability to understand very much about the universe. We know how to breed, we know how to kill, but we cannot speak to other beasts unless they learn to speak our language. Humanity resembles Americans in some ways. Only a tiny minority of Americans can speak more than one language. Change comes slowly to some.<br />When an octopus is captured great care must be taken to see that it does not escape. They can squeeze through tiny little holes since they have no bones, and then they seem to have the ability to know where to go, in which direction is the ocean. Leave the lid slightly tipped and suddenly you’re following a wet trail to the toilet and down the sewer. Put a human in a jar, even with the lid loose, and they tend to sit there and ponder their fate. Our bones hold us up and hold us back. As a result we grew better able to think ahead and plan things. Octopi may have already been down that road and made the choice to stay in the water and take life more easily. Squid try to keep a low profile since humanity learned they are tasty and there are millions of them down there. Like the whale hunters, fishermen never consider the concept that their prey may actually be more advanced intellectually than hunters. Like those who live near tigers and poisonous snakes, creatures in the sea have come to grips with the fact that there are predators and prey and sometimes one becomes the other. As any squid could tell you, nothing in this universe is forever, things always change over time. When giant monsters roamed the oceans the squid swam around inside long, hard shells shaped like cones. It was difficult to eat something inside a shell so that worked out. When the meteor knocked out much of the planet’s animal life the oceans down deep were the best place to hide while things returned. Near the black stacks there was heat and food. Once the big sea monsters were dead the squid dropped their shells and became the form with which we are familiar. Shrews on land grew up and out and larger, modifying forms and function over millions of years, eventually to become primates and humans. Meanwhile the squid and the whales continued to war and the world continued to change over time.<br />If we back up a little bit to get some distance between ourselves and the whole picture. We know that living things change over time, that species change over time, the planet changes over time, so everything we can witness is alive in some way and evolving. We are a part of this great change as living creatures and so we must somehow step aside from ourselves to be able to see the rest of the&nbsp; system. A metaphor might be the oceans: when you swim in the oceans you see the surface and a few cms beneath, but unless the light is right you don’t see too many of the creatures swimming beneath your feet. If you snorkel or scuba dive you see more, but the myriad of particles and diatoms and plankton simply block your view of what is beyond. You cannot see the sea for the sea creatures in the sea. It is exactly the same as our planet swimming through the galaxy: we see a portion of our system most of the time but when we look out too far we see very little but “empty space”, which is swarming with energy and mass and even Things that we cannot see. The squid live in the ocean and there they hunt their prey, but how do they see? They do that by evolving some of the best eyes we have ever seen. They grew the tools they needed. They also grew sensitive skin and other specialized means of sensing what is out there in the dark. The whales developed a form of speech that can be heard hundreds of miles away, or at least before humans invented submarines, sonar, and diesel engines. Now you can’t hear very much down there at all but a low hum. The Earth has developed tinnitus.<br />We think collectively of our Galaxy, our cosmic neighbors, as a Thing, but it is a mass, a region of space-time, a complex of energies swirling in a less dense sea of energies and we ride the tide on a tiny speck of slow moving energies thinking we know what we are doing. But we do not know what is being done to us by the rest of Existence because we cannot see half of it. Many years ago, perhaps, and maybe even now, some could see spirit, could see the non-substantial in living forms. Most evolved out of that skill set while we pounded rocks together to make axes and harpoons. We lost the skill to listen. The rest of Existence, however, never lost the skill of speaking. We have recently re-realized that trees communicate with each other, as do pretty much any living species we get around to examining. We simply cannot hear them. That is, of course, part of the problem: we are listening with our ears.<br />The colony of cells which grows today eventually will break apart and the cells will disband their alliances. Some of them will disband their corporal existence and return the parts to the Earth. The Earth, itself a giant entity, takes in the reformed beings, mulls them over and redeposits them back into life in some new form. Everything changes, nothing remains the same. This pattern must work in exactly the same manner when thinking about consciousness. Mind breaks down the same way matter does. As energy slows down it becomes matter, as matter speeds up it becomes energy. Throughout this dance we have consciousness weaving a complex pattern of growth, understanding, fading away… not unlike the patterns in swirling smoke lit by a shaft of sun. We see the beautiful swirling motes when they pass through the light, but all around is a great swarm of smoke that is not lit up. Since our eyes see only a tiny window, we see only a tiny fraction of the dance. Is it any wonder we misunderstand the whole picture? We hear the drum, but not the guitar. We see the dancer’s right arm every few seconds but the legs are in shadow. We can be forgiven for misunderstanding.<br /><br />W.D. Shirleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14961797718073179845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6342131.post-22195676743254449902016-08-06T08:31:00.000-04:002016-08-06T08:31:54.580-04:00Summertime and the Living are UneasyBack in the day as we oldsters apparently say, things were different. It used to be that old forgetful fart would be relying on his memory to assert that "back in the day...." everything was cheaper, doctors gave a shit, things lasted longer and were made in America by union workers.<br />Interestingly enough, you might notice that all that stuff is true. Things change. Hell, even I change! For instance, I have lost a lot of weight on purpose and by plan, so I am packing less lard. Furthermore, we garden a lot more area now even though both myself and my sweety-pie are finding it hard to bend, kneel or otherwise move like you must in order to work a garden. This must mean I am alive, since as we all know, life changes things, things which change are alive, even if we don't understand how. Mountain ranges change over time, in fact they might have been an ocean floor at some point in the past/future, and being alive, they have changed over time. Changing life over time is evolution and all things evolve which are changing/alive. Nothing stays the same, because Nothing is a One Part quality. Nothing is all that it is.<br />Our perceptions of the Universe are changing over time as our sense improve. In the same way a baby is half blind at birth, having not needed vision in the womb, as this sense changes over time they are able to perceive a different Universe. Now that we have so many high resolution cameras in orbit, and super powerful computers to process the feed, we are seeing the old Universe in such a new way it has created a New Universe.<br />We saw before by visible light, photons hitting our retinas and activating chemical changes in our neural net. When a camera sees in much higher or lower frequencies than the human eye can see, objects and conditions appear which change our understanding of "empty" space.<br />First of all, we got here by basic Newtonian physics. The way things spin is controlled by the simple physics most of us learned in high school. Gravity, ramps, levers, etc. all work well at low speeds and frequencies. Take those cameras in space: they spin around the planet at speeds relative to their altitudes. When you have thousands of satellites flying around the earth at many different heights you need to know where each one is going to be at any one time, and Newton's Laws and equations always do that for us. The trouble began at different speeds and sizes. When you look at things going at the speed of light or so they no longer quite match those predictions based on Newton, and when great masses are involved, like galaxies, light is noticeably bent into a focus, causing very odd artifacts in the eyes of those cameras. What you see is no longer what you get, should you be able to go there and get anything.<br />Well, when you examine the things orbiting the entire Universe, i.e. the galaxies, it seems the equations don't match the data. Actually, when you examine the problem you can see that some of the "facts" are actually assumptions, like the mass of the known Universe. That changes the gravitational pull on those galaxies and that changes their speed relative to their orbits.<br />So, they looked in long wavelengths for those dark Things which were adding so much mass but not radiating in the visible light spectrum. They did not see anything. Then they checked the math and the data and what they realized was they did in fact see what it was, but their perception was spoiled by certain assumptions.<br />Consider what a bacteria sees when it looks out upon your lower intestinal tract. Chances are, we believe, the bacteria does not see a great ape descendant, or a higher being, but more like a landscape, spread out and mindless before it, waiting to be developed by tens of thousands of similar bacteria. We, of course, assume the bacteria within do nothing of the sort because that would be too scary to admit.<br />We looked out at the Universe and assumed our perfect human eyes saw all there was to see, and our perfect human minds could figure out what exactly it was we did see. Things change.<br />95% of the Universe is "Black Matter"... stuff that pervades everything you see but is so monstrously huge that it literally staggers the imagination and you must see it as lifeless. This assumption is not backed by any data. 5% of the Universe is matter like you and Mars, stuff that works by either Newtonian or Quantum physics rules and laws. 5% is Black Energy, stuff which does what energy does but does it in a form and frequency that we just can't perceive it except with complex math, split out among many Big Computers.<br />Now, with the introduction of the concept we can modify our math used to process images and "see" where the dark matter is relative to the "light" matter which we can see with our own eyes and it is like clouds in our coffee, to be expected because the Universe doesn't like the sort of "order" our brains love to impose on things which have no inherent order, like spots on a piece of paper, or stars in the night sky.<br />Now that we see and perceive the Universe more properly and it now has a math to fit the data, we can begin to work with reality, maybe new realities to go along with the new understanding of how things move the way they do up there. As we do, perhaps we can also reconsider the idea that the Thinking Thing is looking up at the Nonthinking Thing. Perhaps it is the other way around, perhaps a bit of each. Thus we are looking up at a consciousness so great and made up of energies we have just begun to notice, that it may think of us as less interesting than a benign bacteria in the cosmic gut, undoubtedly incapable of thought/consciousness. It's okay, perhaps it is just as well we are not very noticeable.W.D. Shirleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14961797718073179845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6342131.post-73607348617538467612016-04-16T06:45:00.002-04:002016-04-16T06:45:37.510-04:00April ShowersThe collapse of the American Empire is unfolding before our eyes. Bridges are no longer being repaired, we just put up signs warning heavy trucks to stay off. Schools are closing and villages are merging with towns and counties to save costs. One of the great things about the Internet is that people of like minds can find one another and share views. One of the bad things about the Internet is that people of like minds can find one another and share ideas. So, while we get solutions to problems we also get the rise of the Fascists. The damage the Party has done to the election industry is being felt as a compulsive liar and reality show host is presented as the best of the Right and a power hungry compulsive liar is the darling of the so-called Left. I suppose being Left of Right counts, but since the Right in question is so far to the right it wears a swastika a left leaning person could still be a fascist police state advocate.<br /><br />Then we have Bernie Sanders.<br /><br />The Powers in charge misunderstood just how pissed off the People are over the decades of lies, the up-flow of all wealth to the .1%, and the costs of getting their children an education compared to every other civilized nation. So while they teased us allowing Bernie to run as a "Democrat" they pt all their power and money towards a Hilary for President. They can't just put her up as the candidate and still call themselves "Democrats", in reference to the concept of "democracy", so they just do what they can to sabotage his campaign. The heavy-handedness with which they have approached their self-made "problem" is so obvious even Democrats can see it. The vocabulary used to cover the stories is glow-in-the-dark clear: Hilary crushes her opponent whereas Bernie only wins or takes votes.... but whenever they can scrape off votes he earned and give them to Hillary, they do. Not exactly rigged per se, but certainly very little is left to chance or democratic principles.<br /><br />I often wonder what a society would look like as a democracy. If People could write laws and present them to the People for review, comments and votes, what laws would exist, what kinds of regulations? Now we can have a single person with wealth and power send up a Bill which financially benefits them and their business partners, post it at midnight and weasel enough votes by dawn that it becomes law, once the trained President is allowed to sign it. In a democracy I could draw up a Bill using forms online and present it to the voters for several weeks of comments and perhaps revision before the entire population is allowed to cast a vote and upon winning the majority of the votes, my Bill would become law! At the moment it is against the law for people to write their own laws and vote on them in a general election, this being New York, one of the most corrupt and fascist of states. Furthermore it should be that in a democracy we have Bills which are written on a single subject, no additional unrelated sub-bills allowed. In this way we don't get a Bill to finance the government with an "Easter egg" of concealed perks for a few businessmen.<br /><br />Most people have been trained to accept any small portion of democracy permitted by the fascists, primarily harmless Bills which declare today to be national bullshit day or some such thing. It brings in extra cash to be part of a committee looking over these useless laws, so our lawmakers like to have plenty of them. It has been observed by the great philosopher Fred Brighton that when all the good and necessary laws have been written we should stop writing new laws, but Congress gets paid both by salary and by number of laws passed, so we then start getting absurd and sometimes even illegal laws passed, which then make lawyers tons of money while they go to the Supreme Republican Court for a Party declared correction. We have "corrected" the Bill of Rights to include the Right of a President to murder American citizens remotely or by proxy so long as they first declare the victim to be a "bad guy". Anyone standing near the victim will also be blown apart but that is what we call, "incidental collateral damage to structures".<br /><br />If Bernie somehow is allowed to take the White House and if Bernie does not stop the fascist wars we are waging, or does not stop the slaughter by drones, then we can declare America to be a "democracy free zone" and we should quietly begin finding a refuge somewhere else on the planet, assuming they allow us to leave.W.D. Shirleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14961797718073179845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6342131.post-44971472068022076642016-01-13T06:55:00.000-05:002016-01-13T06:55:53.931-05:00A New YearNow that I have survived yet another year I suppose I should be happy not to be stuck in a hospital bed somewhere or living in fear in Syria, but life is a funny thing when you have it, it seems like it is just like air: you take what you get and exhale the rest.<br />David Bowie died for our sins, our sins of omission, our sins of neglect, our sins of distraction. He was beloved by millions and will will long be remembered. Almost on the same day a 89 year old lady died in Massachusetts and her family mourns her now, plans her wake and burial and dozens of people mourn her passing. We may agree that when a soul moves on the Earth is diminished and when a new person is born the earth is reborn, thus the heartbeat of the universe is maintained. The pulse of the planet remains strong.<br />Now the oceans are rising and will do so increasingly as our "Leaders" debate if mankind is worth saving or if we should simply count it as a real estate offering which promises great things. But here's the Thing: when disaster occurs we lose the very young, as they cannot yet adapt. We lose the very old as they have no resources left to recover. The remaining have neither the innocence of youth nor the wisdom that comes with age. The world like a black hole eats the knowledge and spits out random radiation. As islands disappear beneath the waves, as Disney watches it's castles crumbling into sand, as beach side resorts become a scuba divers vacation spot, as the skyscrapers in New York find their foundations crumbling under salt water attack, will we have the intelligence to forget the damn elections for a few years and get started moving the populations away from Death and towards Tomorrow?<br />Probably not, such a reaction would be unique in our history.<br />The sun rises and the sun sets. Life flares and then fades. The music has to stop eventually, why not sooner than later? But chances are the last to leave will whistle a little tune as they stride toward the Light. A few eternities later the energies will have created new worlds, new Life, new debates about meaning. The new poets will little suspect they walk on the powdered bones of great thinkers and performers.<br />But there will never be another David (Jones)Bowie, never another Ziggy Stardust. Grandma will never hold her dear babies in her lap, never brush away their tears again.<br />But existence and Love cannot be destroyed as this is the basis for life, so things change but they change again later. So someday another child of earth will sing a song nobody has ever heard, in a tune nobody has ever imagined.<br />The universe tapping it's feet to the tune of the gravity waves washing up on the shore of a black hole, pauses and listens to the thin sounds of a great ape helping her child sleep beneath fading stars.<br /><br />W.D. Shirleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14961797718073179845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6342131.post-21266596021076743372015-10-05T07:19:00.001-04:002015-10-05T07:19:21.517-04:00Summer's End<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mgmRSCHkPhQ/VhJZMRXYdjI/AAAAAAAAmks/v-BUtcbHR1c/s1600/IMG_2085.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mgmRSCHkPhQ/VhJZMRXYdjI/AAAAAAAAmks/v-BUtcbHR1c/s320/IMG_2085.JPG" width="213" /></a></div>This is the time of year when what your efforts were worth are displayed on the shelves in your basement if you're lucky enough to have one. Here in the 21st century we can tomatoes from grandmother's saved seeds, we pick up fallen fruit and make sauce, jellies and juices. We start pulling finished plants out of veggie beds and setting things up for next year. And we evaluate how we did.<br /><br />People sometimes ask me how I manage to be so busy when I am in such pain, but when you are in the garden weeding or harvesting you aren't thinking about pain and your back, you're thinking about jelly and stews and root cellar designs. You're thinking about all those hops you harvested, estimating how many gallons of ale can be made. You're feeling a direct connection between your stomach and the Fecundity of the Earth. You feel the love of the soil. This is worth a little pain, and sometimes it can be worth a lot of pain.<br /><br />Sometimes I relate to the garden as a newer Eden, testing my ability to learn from the planet, to find a spiritual meaning in life. The Japanese have gardens of sand which never give forth fruit, and this is where they meditate on life. I have gardens of flowers, fruit, veggies....all vibrant and alive most of the year, inviting and supportive of my life in my pain. My ashes will be scattered in this garden.<br /><br />My parents are dead, my son is dead, my best friends Teddy and Larry are dead... yet the other day I got an email from a man I had been sure was dead! Seems my information was premature. The thing which intrigues me is the concept that maybe in my previous universe he was dead but when I shifted into a different shadow I found one where he was still living. In an infinite universe this is possible. So the thought comes back instantly, "Where would I have to go to get Teddy and Larry back and how would it impact my current family? What about Jon?" Say you knew you could shift universes and somebody you loved was dead, so you shift and now they are alive, maybe they had a little accident but not fatal. But when you look around you find that somebody assassinated the President or your daughter was still born.... what would you do then, go back? How would you find the right universe? Lots of details to consider. Sometimes it is best to let sleeping Universes lie.W.D. Shirleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14961797718073179845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6342131.post-83676083283431738932015-01-27T09:06:00.000-05:002016-01-13T06:57:46.296-05:00WITHIN YOU WITHOUT YOU<br /><br />&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;It's been a little over a year since Jon died and my life has been somehow hollowed out. Margaret and Jess are still there, even more loving and vital as before, but the longing for hope, the reading obtuse articles looking for hope, for names and places to contact because my son, my boy was in there goddam it and somebody had to listen! Now that's all gone and I have certain knowledge that hundreds of men and women are in their beds in contorted, bizarre positions, thinking about Life, thinking about how unfair and how cruel life can be to those who did no harm. They know that those around them have no faith, that they are considered as less than human, yet deserving of casual attention. Sometimes the nurses call them by name, the way you name a favorite house plant.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Does this seem overly cynical and mean? Well, that is what happens when you tear out a chunk of a man and deny the healing process. I don't want Jon to become a distant memory, a sad blessing. I want my anger at those doctors to continue to burn and nag at me, to cause me to look still for stories and solutions for those poor souls trapped inside their own skin.&nbsp;And as I consider this situation, as I regret to inform myself that in America the unFree nothing is free and nothing is done without a profit made. Hulks of flesh who can think cannot earn a lot of profit for the Board, so research into their situation is very low priority, far below the sex life of wild salmon. If anyone should ever suggest making a census-like effort to determine the health of every man, woman and child, not in that order, so that the sick might be healed and the dying made comfortable, the very next statement will involve "money", that invention of the Sumerians for their accountants who had no texts or literacy. 5,000 years later it is the end-all and be-all of Western civilization, which is rapidly becoming the World civilization. But it's a trick, with it you can visualize people, carts of grain, loaves of bread as little wooden or brass counters, like pieces in a game board. In order for this paradigm to work, that of denying health and comfort to the world, you have to consider the pile of tokens to be supreme in order of importance. Dying children can be dismissed by simply moving beads on a loom and reaching a final figure. No profit there.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>One of the greatest minds of the century cannot move enough of his body to communicate, but with wires and expensive devices he teaches, writes, and solves problems that the greatest computers cannot envision. In a totally profit driven society, like much of America today, he would have been abandoned in a nursing home to die in a few years of pneumonia followed by heart failure. The people who would shake their profit driven heads as they denied the young man any special attention are incapable themselves of comprehending the tiniest part of his research nor of understanding the value of pure physics in advancing human civilization. They only know little wooden counters stuck in the sand.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>So the anger at so many good people being left trapped in their bodies, many will have gone into a state of learned hopelessness from which there is often no way home, is with me, shall be, and I determine to continue to try to initiate some interest in our fellow human beings. It seems like something Jon would like me to do, as it was something that he was doing even as his van struck that truck and began his slow, sad death.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I like to plan, literally plan things. By drawing a picture to scale I can really see it in 3D and I can start breaking things down to their essential parts, put them in order, prioritize and otherwise do things instead of sitting still. Obviously this condition became sharpened and focussed with Jon in the picture. The stakes were beyond high for me regarding Jon. My son was sometimes more me than I was, taking up more thought and energy than me getting up, getting dressed and driving down to Lake Katrine. Now I get up and plan the garden, I think about ramps for wheelchairs because it occurred to us when Jon was getting better that to visit home would be difficult at best. The doorways were too narrow, the steps to every outside door were rather old so getting them out and putting in a ramp made good sense. Now I am thinking about my own back condition, that they call it "degenerative" for a reason, as Doc Izzo used to say. I may very well someday need those wider doors and ramps leading out to the raised bed gardens.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>In a way,trying to prepare for Jon has made me more prepared for me, or maybe even Margaret. It could be anyone, anytime and the way things are going politically it is a wise person who does not plan on the government offering any help to someone who cannot turn a profit for them. Already the corporations can vote in blocks, unlike fleshy humans who are restricted to at best, one vote, and that vote is contingent on certain conditions. For instance, generally the rich are much more likely to be able to cast a vote and have it counted than someone who is penniless and on the street, even though both are citizens, on the barn side it reads: "some citizens have greater rights than others". Libtards continue to resist the sloughing off of the red numbers on the tally sheet. No offense, but they just aren't good for business. Random, wild card voters just muddy up the counting. With redistricting a fine, early art form they only have to have a show of hands in the room to determine who gets to play the part of President and so on.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>While they play I plan. I'm pretty sure each door can have a pleasant looking ramp and landing which will allow even 95 year old Will a place in the sun. If we can grow our own foods and meds then we should be better than half-way to being inconspicuous. That is always a good way to be. I remember in Haight Ashbury in 1967 being as quiet as a young man can be with a backpack, walking stick and no visible reason to exist. Thus we avoid the fuzz. It did not always work, but then if it did it's job you might not know it happened anyway. The point is to be on your toes, not someone elses.<br /><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>It does not fill the hole, this gardening of mine, nor does the photography and website because so many are not around to &nbsp;admire or critique my efforts. So many of the folk I admire have gone on to better things, leaving me and Margaret with the dross, at least that's how it feels sometimes, especially when things go wrong as they do I miss the wisdom, the comfort, or even the little secret smiles as the obvious is pointed out, deflating a pout or a tantrum. Like when Larry turned the distributor cap around 180 degrees to start the BMW. Or when Jon grabbed our dinner plates and returned with them to the kitchen where he rearranged and redistributed the parts to serve a delightful, lovely meal out of what I had prepared and then just slopped on the plates. It was great learning from people I love. Margaret tries her best, but she does not understand how much I respect her opinion and a lot of times, bless her heart, she clams up as I screw up and then cleans up with only a slight "I could have told you so". sigh.W.D. Shirleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14961797718073179845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6342131.post-30354737799607127282014-11-01T07:30:00.000-04:002014-11-01T07:30:51.179-04:00New LifeThe garden is in full flower now, with the wisteria hanging on the arch that marks the start of the Garden Path. The goldenrods have taken over any ground that does not contain a shrub and I'm not sure if there is enough time before winter to chop them all down so I can see where I need to add more flowers. I wouldn't mind the rods if they just flowered and stayed put, but they always try to take over the entire area and since they grow from the roots each time I cut one down four more sprout up. I have to find some purpose for them, maybe weaving cages for tomatoes... once you need a plant like this it goes away. Contrarywise, when I discovered that valerian worked on my back pain I began to see it growing all over the yard. It all depends on the mind of the plant.<br /><br />The Israelis are working on their "Final Solution" for the Gazans, wiping out every man, woman and child, all the time declaring how precise they are and how careful they are not to hit civilians. It would seem they are either the worst army in the world or the best liars, because some 1500 civilians have died from Israeli missiles and bullets. This demonstrates, I think, how when one obsesses about something, especially an enemy or past insult, you gradually take on the attributes of that enemy. You become a fascist if you worry all the time about Hitler and his boys and if you constantly complain about the horrors of the Death Camps you will be compelled to make one for yourself and fill it full of enemies so you can wipe them out. They haven't pulled up trucks and pumped in exhaust gases, but bombs and missiles look more like a war instead of a genocide.<br /><br />Meanwhile I am reading about the history of the region, especially the Jews. I want to understand why that area always seems ready to kill some group or another. One thing you notice is the consistency of the events. The Palestinians around Gaza have been taking it in the shorts for thousands of years now, it seems, no matter who it is oppressing them you have to feel sorry for them. Now it's the Israelis again, stepping up to take over and kill them all for the various crimes involved in resisting the takeover/genocide. Israel wants the ocean side. They also want all arable lands in all directions. YHWH promised them and they plan to accept the invitation, after all, it IS the Creator making the offer. Trouble is, even in the Bronze Age they knew it meant killing every one related to all the people they feel are in their way so as long as babies are born and memories remain there will be one war after another until everyone is wiped out.<br /><br />At the same time you read over the Torah and related texts like the Dead Sea Scrolls, it's important to also read the Quran and Bible. That's a real eye opener! I love my Muslim friends but I must say that like the Old Testament there is a great deal of hatred for one's neighbors if they don't share your faith. It's a curious thing but YHWH has set everyone in the ME at each other as a basic part of their faith. It seems that the Prophet was abused by the Jews, most likely for not being a Jew, but to be fair the other Arabs also abused Him. But as a result of a personal insult He inserted into His revelation the idea that Jews must be converted or killed. The Jews have a different take on it, believing that converts to Judaism are not exactly "Jewish". The constitution of Israel makes it clear that only Jews who have descended from Jews since the Creation can be called Real Jews. The rest are wannabes who may or may not make it into heaven. Christians descend from Jews who believed that the Messiah had arrived and the End Times were upon us. Trouble is, He said it was happening right then and would be completed in their lifetimes. Now, some 2,000 years late they still think nothing is wrong, He's just using that kind of speech where a "lifetime" means "several lifetimes" and "is upon you" means "someday will happen". In other words they are in serious denial. Regardless of the whereabouts of this Messiah they have adopted the zero tolerance philosophy of the Jews and applied it to the Muslims. It seems we have to wipe them out for the Messiah to show His head again. Curious decision coming from the King of Peace, ain't it?<br /><br />So, while logic dies in the desert along with little girls and boys, the World watches blood flowing from their lawn chairs at CNN, sipping their tea and nibbling on lady fingers. Not their kids, why should they worry? Naturally, those of us who recall the World Trade Center remember that it was our ambivalent attitude toward the killing of innocents which placed a target on the city. Now we happily sell weapons and ammo to the Israelis so they can complete their Final Solution and naturally we will be so surprised if the Arab world sees this as somehow dis-respecting their right to life. The classic response will be to murder as many innocent Americans as they can. <br /><br /><br />W.D. Shirleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14961797718073179845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6342131.post-3197286764146466552014-11-01T07:29:00.002-04:002014-11-01T07:29:45.113-04:00Cat Humor<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The cats no longer laugh at my jokes. For a long time I thought it was because most of my jokes are based on puns, and cats only admit to knowing American English as a second or third language. So when you tell them a pun, most of the time they will just stare at you. But I mean the other kinds of jokes, even a pratfall doesn't get a chuckle out of them. Brighton acts as if the mafia were looking for him and Mariah is pretending to be Catwoman, going out at night and victimizing the local rodents. She's above it all. Buddy laughs. He's a good dog and I can count on his support in most things. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> It's not like I plan a career as a stand up comedian for critters, but since I spend a great part of my conversations speaking to a cat or dog or chicken, I tend to expect a reaction from my audience. The hens tend to get very literal. They find human humor difficult to fathom. Go ahead, ask a chicken why they crossed the road, they will not look you in the eyes, they will mumble and mention something about greener pastures and all, but they will never say “to get to the other side”. It's just not the way hens think. Cats don't appreciate humor because they tend to be overly sensitive about their own appearances and a pie in the face is just a mess to them. Subtle jokes are impossible to understand in a cat mind, they are not very subtle beasts. But a dog... well, a dog will do most anything to please a human, even laugh at their jokes. For that I thank them.</div>W.D. Shirleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14961797718073179845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6342131.post-3605676085824229522013-11-02T09:17:00.001-04:002013-11-02T09:17:20.430-04:00And At The End, Still JonI don't know what he looked like at the end because he had just been released back to his new facility, Riverside in Castleton. All I know was that he stopped breathing. I suppose it looked as if he had just gone to sleep, which is curious because of course he has been sleeping for years and years. In the end I knew it would be his lungs, it's so easy for an unmoving person to just clog up and stop breathing. Jon had been healthy once and I suppose that he stopped smoking long enough to have healthier lungs just before he got hit. Ironic that Life seems to match things up like that. Some people think of the date of the accident as a kind of birthday into a new life. I had often wondered what Jon would be like when he awoke from that sleep. I wondered if he would be strangely sweet and childlike... I had seen many survivors who had slipped into an innocent phase. As a father I wanted to be prepared should that happen. Jon had been at times gullible, dumping fingernail polish on the hood of a neighbor's car on Cabbage Night. The kids next door could get Jon into so much trouble but he just didn't seem to want to hang with kids who just explored, swam, played and did not try to shoplift. In other words he was a lot like my Dad.<br /><br />Back on Pershing Drive in 1975 when Jon had not yet walked I woke up early for some reason and tip-toed out to find a trail of crackers and crumbs from the pantry to Jon's room. I peeped into Jon's room to find him trying to climb back into his crib with a cracker in each hand. he heard me, dropped into the crib and began to cry. Nancy called from the bedroom, "You woke him, you take care of him!"<br /><br />Somewhere we have a picture of Jon a few years later, hiding in the bathtub while eating a box of sugar donuts. He looked like a clown putting on his makeup, white powder all over his face and a big shit-eating grin on his face. No shame, no gain I guess. He was a cute kid.<br /><br />He wasn't, of course, all bad by any means, but like me and his mother, he was heavy maintenance. You had to look out for him and be patient. I was not very patient with him, but then he did look a lot like his mother, to me, and sometimes that just pissed me off. Odd, ain't it? And again, not always, just some memories won't go away, and me being unreasonable to a young man being defensive was a memory i would like to work away and now Jon cannot hear me say I am sorry and I can't hear him say it's okay. Sucks. We have many such memories that can't work out like some strange vine with thorns has wrapped it self around my heart and you can't pull it away without tearing the heart up. So you figure something else out.<br /><br />There's a video you can find on the Web which shows the tsunami washing over a town and dragging it back in pieces to the sea. It was unstoppable, there was no way a human force could deflect it away from those paper and bamboo huts. The brick and mortar buildings got knocked off their foundations, which got washed away too. Eventually besides the debris field the town itself stopped existing. Traumatic brain injury is like that wave of greatest force that rushed into&nbsp; his mind and brain and tore it loose from it's foundations. Eventually it swept away in debris fields. Each seizure, each fever ate away at more of the Town of Jon. There was enough to hope for a re-build, a newer, different Jon who would nevertheless be the same kid somehow. I often thought of what Jon would be like when he awoke. I do know that the money angle insured that Jon would never get the therapy he needed to force his brain to wake up and heal. They just don't care to save someone like Jon whose future was unsure and whose past had been, in the eyes of Society, somewhat ill-used. Driving an old VW van around to concerts in strange cities, working as a car tech, a chef, a dishwasher... whatever work he could find to pay his bills.... dog food, gasoline and the occasional new block for the van.<br /><br />Dad loved to fly. He loved it so much he went to war to be a glider pilot and probably die in battle, but in the air. Dad loved to fly so much he wouldn't let no damn thunderhead the size of Mt. Washington get in his way in his one engined Cessna. No, he'd fly off, take a few spins and slam into a mountain the size of a regular mountain. The sheriff called us to say he was alright, just a broken nose. Jon didn't have Dad's "luck". When he flew out the windshield he did not break his nose.<br /><br />Tomorrow is Jon's birthday. Tonight Margaret and Jess and I will burn some wood, drink some beer, light candles, incense and such and celebrate his life with us. This is too much of a good thing if you ask me. Too many circles within circles and yet like a Moebius strip you end up at the same place. I think it is possible that in time we get back around to where we were but without really grasping how we got there. Then you can wander over to Why, although as we know from the Brighton Theory of '50: "There is no Why, Only When.".<br /><br />The Law states that It is Good to Love. This opens us up to growth, spirituality, satisfaction in Life... that which Lives, Loves. When you think about it, there has to be an earlier Law which states that Good Exists. It would have to be defined by adding Bad. You'd have: Good/Bad... or Bad/Good, but I favor the former. Better to start out with Good. We are born, certainly, with Bad first as we are drawn and pushed&nbsp; out of our mother. Then as we are given a breast to suckle we sense Good. I hear it is possible to come forth in quiet, loving environments with no squalling and beeping of instruments. Jon was pretty quiet about the whole thing, he just sort of popped right out in about ten minutes. The OB didn't even have time to get involved. So maybe he started out with Good and then later got to Bad.<br /><br />It is beautiful today. I saw a pair of great birds flying in lazy circles. We have a few pairs of eagles in the region and they sometimes check out the hen yard as they make for the riverside east of us. Lots of critters to find, but it was better when the acreage between us and Northern Pines was a field and not a subdivsion. They can, however, also take small dogs, cats and rabbits. They are after all, full grown eagles.... perhaps BIG redtail but you get my point. Actually my point was that in Egyptian religious tradition Scorpio was an eagle, not a scorpion. Thus a pair of eagles flying overhead as we celebrate Jon's life, him being a Scorpio three times over, was somehow ironic or poignant. I'm not sure it is, but it was a lovely concept. Dad had a wonderful eagle tattooed on his chest, and he loved to fly. <br /><br />W.D. Shirleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14961797718073179845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6342131.post-24698641189383354002012-10-26T04:23:00.001-04:002012-10-26T04:23:30.725-04:00AutumnalIn the last year I have spent much too much time on Facebook just looking at other pictures and seeing how some artists around the world are doing. Not a bad thing to any great extent but still here we sit with almost a year of no journal. Now we have to catch up.<br /><br />The state of New York has decided that they will cut a deal with the Northeast Center for Special Care, where Jon is staying. They will let them have more beds ($$) if they make them all "short term care". Since Jon is obviously not short term he will have to be moved. Nobody has given a lot of thought to what happens to people like Jon, just so long as the guys at the top keep making money. Well, eleven years ago we took 6 months to find one place that would accept Jon in his condition. Nothing has changed much in the intervening years except maybe fewer locations willing to accept a man with a trache and a coma. I am going down a short list of place which are not under indictment or being investigated or fined. It is not surprising in this country to find out how corrupt the health care system is, but still disappointing because when you mention this many people are upset at "dissing America" but a pig is a pig even in lipstick. Long term care doesn't make a huge profit and the only turnover is when they die, so they are not anxious to keep the patients who have no chance of healing. You might have noticed that with that attitude there is no chance of healing Jon. I have.<br /><br />Meanwhile the roof still leaks, the ceiling threatens to collapse and both of our vehicles died in one week. It's been a busy summer. Once the built up beam is designed and placed we can get somebody to sheet rock the living room, we can bring home some of the furniture in storage and close down the storage unit. That will free up a bit of money towards the car payments. That will also exhaust our savings. Welcome to retirement, Margaret! But we have many opportunities to do better. We can grow more of our own food, go to farmers markets and sell stuff, enter art shows and practice my photography. Next year might be better weather, too and if we start earlier we should have better luck in the garden. This year it rained for over a week precisely when the beans were drying on the vines. I thought foolishly that dried beans would be easier to pick than trying to get out there every damn day and pick the green ones. Now we have no beans from that bed. Luckily for me I always plant a few beds with the same crop in case something happens. So we have a freezer with green and yellow beans, just no crocks of dried beans. I give it a "C" grade.<br /><br />It's 4:15 AM and I should be sleeping but I find it hard to get back to sleep when there are so many things which need me. So I will take naps during the slow moments. That's about it for now...I need some hot tea and some time to think about things. This election coming up might be significant if the Fascists win. I'm not sure how much more the poor can take and we aren't exactly rich. Curiously I begin to see that climate change might be the only thing which could stop the USA from becoming Germany of the 1930's. When your Capitol is under water you have to notice something is up. Even Donald Trump, moron and chief mouth for the right will have to admit that with NYC abandoned and Washington DC under water we might want to review what we did to cause this. I am sure the Trump will say it's that nigger's fault in the White House except he won't say what he's thinking, he'll call him a "liberal" and that means the same thing to the Right.W.D. Shirleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14961797718073179845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6342131.post-48858734792186627122011-12-23T08:54:00.000-05:002011-12-23T08:54:56.083-05:00Another Winter SolsticeClimate change? The yard is brown and soggy without a speck of snow or ice. Mums are trying to bloom again and the forsythia has a single yellow bloom on it. I need to collect dry wood and put it into the woodshed for the bonfires, otherwise it seems the various Holy Days are marked with a week or so of rain and you can't hardly get a match to light. I suppose this is why the Catholics got into lighting candles inside... it's the same phenom.<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nTKihFQVLRY/Skt59Mn-uCI/AAAAAAAAElw/gCWB7Mnv-cM/s1600/IMG_3944.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nTKihFQVLRY/Skt59Mn-uCI/AAAAAAAAElw/gCWB7Mnv-cM/s320/IMG_3944.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>Since we started asking our homeowners insurance to pay for the ceiling falling down it has rained almost continuously and not a drop seems to be leaking inside. Go figure. That seems to prove the "ice dam theory" as why it leaked so much last winter. The new year will see so many changes and maybe we'll get a new roof. Maybe it will be dry enough to grow tomatoes and beans. Maybe I'll get my sciatic nerve burned in half again and suffer a little bit less. That would be swell.W.D. Shirleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14961797718073179845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6342131.post-24745341145254541382011-09-15T13:32:00.000-04:002011-09-15T13:32:50.245-04:00Analogous to What?<img alt="" border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-4TvUKPc3knw/TnIpSeQOqzI/AAAAAAAAKAM/sZDXAD5VVAA/s320/IMG_0183.JPG" style="clear: both; float: left; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px;" />The trouble with analogies is that they are at least one step away from the Truth of things. The longest journey begins with but a single step, and so you can go a long way away from the Truth of things just by committing to an analogy. For instance: on a stormy afternoon a rumble of thunder passes by and we are told "That's Doc Holiday and Wyatt Earp fighting it out at the O-K Corral!" and yet our father told us that it was but the rumble of ionized air when a lightning flash passed through the atmosphere! This could create a crisis of faith between a boy and his father and that would be very sad. If the boy is George Bush, well it could be disastrous. But it doesn't really matter who the boy is, there was trouble which could be avoided if George had just been struck by lightning.<br /><br />The picture to the left here is another case in point. The image shows a shrine to a local fertility god framed by two sacred trees which have the attributes of the primal male and female. During a drought the local tribal women paint the figure in red mixture made from goats blood and milk. They festoon the trees with garlands made from their hair and offer cups of beer on the ground before the shrine. Since they can't make beer during a drought they have the responsibility of always saving aside a jar or two of beer.&nbsp; In good times they will rotate out the cups of beer to insure quality of offering. They drink the "exhausted" beer themselves. During a drought they may not be able to offer as many cups of beer, but still, they can count on a few cups of beer for the family until the rains come back. If they run out of beer and the rains still have not come back they will chop down the sacred trees and burn the figure in a huge bonfire. They dance and toss wood into the fire as long as they can. When they have exhausted themselves they collapse on the earth. Then the rains come, filling up everyone's jars, the local streams run again, and the night air is filled with the sounds of animals again. In gratitude they take the last log from the fire and fashion a figure from it. They prop it up at the site of the last shrine and plant two seedlings of their sacred trees.<br /><br />That's not a shrine to any thing, it's a piece of driftwood, flotsam pulled out of the Hudson and propped up against a couple of trees. But the story told more and conveyed more than just the collection of the words and that influenced how one might view that picture, even after reading this.<br /><br />Now suppose it happened that you felt very strongly that your life had been blessed by Life, the land, water, sky and spirit of the place has sustained you through many hard seasons. There's a place you like to go to, a stream of water flowing past an enormous cedar tree. The roots of this tree embrace the earth, covered deeply with moss, a spring trickling out from below, through the moss covered roots and down to the fast flowing stream. It has a quiet and a calmness which is Great. You take some clay from the stream and you start forming the clay into a figure that gives you the same feeling somehow. A round bellied female form whose arms extend out and up to embrace the sky while Her feet arm firmly in the Earth below. You put it nestled against the mossy hollow there. When you go there you can close your eyes and still see the green and the rich brown while the stream still tumbles and the spring sparkle... in that time without time you feel not apart from the All, but truly a Part of it. That is one step closer to the Truth of all things.<br /><br />Others took to resting by the stream and one puts a large rope around the trunk of the tree, to see how big it is around. He leaves the rope. In time people have meditated on the Rope in that Holy area, the shrine of our lady of clay, and perhaps they have collected many truths about the story of our lady. Let us say that in that far away time I come to the shrine and park my bike against the gate post, walk up the trail and down the path. I kneel in the moss as had thousands through the years, a pair of round depressions in the moss from all those knees. As I start to meditate on the figure of clay I notice a small depression, like a belly button. I lean in carefully to see it better. It's a fingerprint! I note one or two others here and there. I sit back and think about it, all the various stories of whose finger and when? My time is up, I leave the shrine confused and somehow distant from my Goddess. Many days later in the city I take my recently acquired AK-47 and my improvised suicide vest and stride toward my assigned target, finally feeling as if I know where I am in the scheme of things.<br /><br />Clearly it's best not to examine the symbols very closely, nor the figures of clay sitting in the Holy of Holies. Leave the spirit where it belongs, deep in that mossy hole you call a heart while the spring of Life still trickles from your breast.W.D. Shirleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14961797718073179845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6342131.post-32195289043315176772011-06-22T13:25:00.000-04:002011-06-22T13:25:10.130-04:00Spring into SummerAin't Misbehaving, neither me nor Louie. It's a drab and dreary day, typical for the time of year. You have two types of weather, too hot and too damp. It's as if a sauna had escaped and was roaming the hills. But that's life and that's the way it goes. Could be worse, could be a skeeter dodging drops and looking in vein for an arm.<br /><br />I haven't seen Jon in many weeks thanks to the old back and this transitional weather. It takes a couple days to uncontract my muscles and get limber enough to chance a 100 mile drive. Then it rains again. But the beans need it. We have a nice garden started here, beans and taters, tomatoes and peppers. It is an exercise in control and chaos. I build the tepees and plant the beans and then see how many sprout. This year all my pole beans were raptured up apparently. I planted them twice to make sure and now I know Kentucky Wonders are either good Christian beans or the moles like them.<br /><br />We have a new puppy, a 2 year old named Buddha whom we call Buddy. Like Wrigley he is a half Corgi but this half is a Pembroke Corgi which comes with no tail. The other half is Beagle so he has the nose and the body. He's more stubborn than Wrigley was, he is willing to stand for several minutes leaning into the leash in an effort to go THAT way instead of the way I want to go. I have proven more stubborn by leaning the other way for several minutes and then I simply sit down and wait. I guess waiting for Jon to get a break has honed my patience. I should wind up a bunch of rings and make more chain mail. I still haven't finished Jess' shirt.<br /><br />There is something going on in Washington and I doubt it means Good Times for one and all. I suspect it has to do with our 14 trillion dollar debt and our inability to raise enough taxes to pay the interest on it.&nbsp; Japan gets Washington state, Oregon goes to India and California goes to China. Debt settled and we can go on from there, borrowing from the Chinese to pay for our 4-5 wars.<br /><br />What does the Creator think about all these bodies? It must be like seeing your blackboard being erased by the chalk. Is it possible for the Creator to become afraid of his creations? Sure, says so in the Bible. He was afraid we'd get not only as smart but as immortal as He and the angels. So he killed the Tree. Now when people die, they are Dead. Or that's the way it is for Yahwist people. Pagans like me keep coming around. Not sure which idea I like best, but the idea of having billions of "first kisses" is a Hell of a great idea! Looking at my son being born, and my daughter being born... and my beautiful wife on our wedding day... to be able to do all that again certainly is a great reason to go through the process. I think Yahweh hasn't been the same since he got his divorce. he needs to get out and meet some nice divinities of the female persuasion. Do a world of good!W.D. Shirleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14961797718073179845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6342131.post-5959146044375706172011-03-20T08:29:00.000-04:002011-03-20T08:29:17.993-04:00Equinox -Spring 2011<style type="text/css">p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } </style> <br /><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">It should be remembered that the All, in it's infinite purity, hasn't a quirk to hang a personality on, nor a flaw which offers a lesson, yet it does; that lack of flaws must be balanced by an infinity of flaws in a infinite field. Thus all those flaws concentrate upon finite Things, if it is a flawed Thing, or a psychosis if it is of the Mind. It requires no trick of the imagination to determine that Infinity must be balanced and if it is, then does not Evil equal Good? In a Way, yes, in the Way that the sun is halfway through it's Path from Solstice to Solstice. It happens, every time it is time to and it doesn't last long, not really, it just feels that way when it's happening to you. So one should remember that Evil is no Quirk of the Infinite One, it is a Quirk of something further down the way to Nothing. Humanity in the form of one person can be “quirky” enough to be called evil, but not Evil itself.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Like the equinox, evil happens in an instant and the echoes of that happening, the reverberating memory pains upon receiving this evil, are what seem to never end. Now an eclipse can last for several minutes, and you might not think of it as an instant of time, yet how does the Moon feels about that brief encounter with a shadow? Hardly a blink. It happens, then it's gone. But it has an impact. People have died, by hand or by happenstance, people have looked up to see death. Thousands have washed up onshore, crushed and rent by some insane hatred of order and balance. They will mine for flesh amid the rubble and drowned debris for weeks and months, but the cities and towns of Japan that have been so torn asunder and drowned are now being irradiated by the unwillingness of humans to face reality for years and years. Is that evil? All those deaths and all that destruction seem to point to a malice behind it all. So we could call it Evil and give it a pitchfork or lightning bolt, or we could even imagine that the Universe itself is inherently Evil to turn a blind eye on those people now gone forever, with grieving loved ones left behind. Some are able to make the kindly Grandfather in the Clouds an occasional wife beater and child molester, but all of that is trying to hang a personality on that which can have none. The quake, the wave, the burning debris floating on the ocean all leave you feeling weak and sick to your stomach. You feel like tearing your hair and screaming. You close your eyes and try to find a quiet center, someplace where it makes sense.&nbsp;</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Where is the balance point at the Equinox, the point at which the egg can stand on it's head? Both science and Belief tells us that the point is within our heart, in the way we see ourselves and our place in it all. It is the point where change can happen. When you find that balancing egg in your heart and know the moment is passing, which side will the egg topple to, guided by gravity and what's inside? You can't know, because there are an infinite number of rays streaming from that point, pointing to where the egg will fall. The further from that point the more room there is for more rays, and more ways to fall. This is where personality comes in and takes a stand. This is where you know where you are going from this moment on. We cannot face the next wave of evil while we refuse to move from the last. We should not want to be part of the next pile of debris, so it's good to think and act and to think about higher ground. In acting, you become a creator, you create a future for yourself. You move, and all things which move are alive. So be alive in your new world, your new creation. At the equinox point you may fall, but you have a chance to determine the direction. If I say you will fall in the direction at which you are looking, remember that in science we know that some basic elements of the universe are determined by the thoughts and actions of the observer. Thus, as your personality perceives the Universe rushing up at it, it knows which way to go, guided by what's inside it.<br /><br />So at this time of year take your philosophy out and set it on the table standing on it's end. Decide which way it will fall and be ready when it does. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div>W.D. Shirleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14961797718073179845noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6342131.post-87417324183061430252011-02-11T09:35:00.000-05:002011-02-11T09:35:04.330-05:00Looking At It<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-S9dEnhzjQGo/TMjPkzdyC5I/AAAAAAAAJSA/ghyQ-_uu96A/s1600/IMG_9569.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-S9dEnhzjQGo/TMjPkzdyC5I/AAAAAAAAJSA/ghyQ-_uu96A/s320/IMG_9569.JPG" width="240" /></a></div>With Wrigley dead there is very little to smile about. I can understand why the Universe would want to hurt me, I'm an asshole sometimes, a real arrogant twerp. So it would make sense to hit my head while bitching about losing a flashlight as if someone else moved the thing, which by the way would be in my coat pocket. So that makes a certain sense. But here's the Thing: what possible Universe would prefer it if the most perfect, intelligent, frisky and kind animal in the world, ever, were to be dead. I repeat the word because a sentient creature will recoil from the illogical and this makes no sense.<br /><br />Now there are these religions I have read about which imply the Creator is a Cosmic Micro-Manager and can take full responsibility for unkind deaths, wars, virii and SDS as well as Saint Somebody and Doctor Izzo. I can, to a degree see logic in that, but it produces such a Psychotic Creator, such a murderous mind that I cannot associate that with Creation at all. From there I have to go to a Mother-like Creator, because only a female can extract life from Her own body. Only a Female Entity can give birth. As Below, So Above. This makes sense to me, and Mothers raise kids differently, and Grandmothers more so. As you go from the One to the Family to the Tribe you still get more progress from Mothers than from Fathers, especially Psychotic Father in Heaven raining down fire and lava and burning napalm. I'm even willing to extend the metaphor to include mercy killing of mal-formed kittens. But you should not enjoy and anticipate it.<br /><br />Then there are religions which are much more self-in-All oriented. Life and Universe are co-equal. The Universe can in fact rain down fire and burning napalm on children and mothers. It can even produce the elements of a body to supply a home for Life, but only Life will make that a Home.<br /><br />It is within the soul of man to confuse one for the other. It is within the mind of man to have the curiosity to constantly test the truth of both. But here there can be no mistake: my friend Wrigley is dead and I have to take home his ashes. There is an expression: all is ashes. This carries with it the image of a burned dwelling, Life has fled. There are but shattered walls and blackness under the gray. But I have images, too, of a tiny pine<span id="goog_1865206658"></span><span id="goog_1865206659"></span> tree growing from a half-melted stump, aglow with moss and tiny flowers, all eating away at the air, the dew, the stump. What is left behind becomes part of the Universe and what leaves returns to Life.<br /><br />A religion is not a faith. I have no religion but I have a faith. I believe in myself first of all, from this island of being I can sense both seen and unseen, tasted and untasted. My mind can feel other mind. That which is felt is also feeling, that which is alive is also changing, we change ourselves just by breathing in a particular piece of air. If you hold your breath just in time to avoid that virus which would have killed you, is this not a miracle? Yet no one is applauding, no one noticed.<br /><br />Two people noticed when Wrigley was hit. Each had a truck and although Wrigley loved trucks and loved new people, he was under my truck and would not let the other man near him. So I picked him up and I put him in the truck, our truck HIS truck and I drove him to a place I thought might just have to kill him, like Hidey the cat was killed. But he was sleepy and in pain and I stroked his head and like I tell my son every time I see him, "You're a good boy. I am so proud of you. I love you so much." But I will not know in a sure way if he heard me because Wrigley was always pretty quiet in the truck. He liked to sleep while I drove.W.D. Shirleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14961797718073179845noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6342131.post-39427666382537564442011-02-01T07:01:00.000-05:002011-02-01T07:01:51.678-05:00I'm Being WatchedI have evidence that I am being read. They never leave their name and they don't always write in American, but they seem to enjoy reading what I have written. Interesting. Just in time for my acquiring fans my knuckles are getting bigger, the finger tips are pointing the wrong directions and my toes hurt. The edges are fraying. I always feel that my pains are from my son, in order to bear his pains. That would be about right, his hands are curled and useless and my fingers are throbbing. His feet have dropped and my toes can't stand pressure. IN a perfect world a son would inherit what his father left behind. In my world the father fades and curls like an Autumn leaf in a fire, burning in the passion a father feels for an injured child. My words are also my children, and they can't leave this page any more than Jon can walk away from the Center. But it's nice to know somebody has come visiting and left a kind word. Now if Jon fares as well, he will smile and focus his eyes on something nice.W.D. Shirleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14961797718073179845noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6342131.post-66957755576546828952011-01-26T10:56:00.000-05:002011-01-26T10:56:44.319-05:00AmazingI am really surprised to find someone who is incapable of wrapping their heads around the concept of the universality of soul, I would find it unnerving to think that we are all of us divided by our souls rather than joined to Soul. Curiously though I am able to begin to pin down when that idea took hold, that we are all "Us" and the rest are "Them". The walls that some have built are as formidable as the ones which encircled Berlin and now Gaza. And perhaps for the same reasons. If a portion of the Humanity believes that the Many are, in fact, at the Essence One, and a portion believe that the concept of individual Souls created by the One is Truth, is there an equation to find a Law to encompass both Truths?<br /><br />Clearly, the answer is Yes. but a lot will not like it, they can't wrap their heads around the idea. I believe that Adam and Eve suffered from this when they ate of the Tree of Knowledge and discovered a lot all at once. They were in shock, as I have been from time to time at an "AH" moment. So the tendency is to take it slow and await for a little aha moment. I favor sudden smart blows to the mind. Like a mace. The mace is short and to the point and it means what it says. So is an enlightenment, but lately we are bombarded throughout our daily lives with other people telling us what to think, how we think and why we all want to get laid. Or sometimes NOT get laid. But to take it slow can just prolong and delay the inevitable shift in thinking.<br /><br />Imagine the Milky Way Galaxy with the center mass and the streaming arms. They cluster around a central arm and the whole pattern is repeated down until the Solar System with it's streaming planets, comets and meteors. It's what they call fractal. Now imagine that each bit of each bite is a personality or epiphany of that fractal pearl. That's Us and the other bites are Them. And that's the Truth. However, that set of bites, their Truths and their planet, are all bits of the Galaxy, the Milky Way, named after a very old story of a Cow who licked the icy brine to create Gods. Someone kicked the bucket. That Cow, those briny Gods and Goddesses all are part of a Pantheon of a Society filled with Functionalities and Celebrities and Administrations and Corporations and All of those are Persons under the Law, which we assert, Rules All.<br /><br />I actually do not enjoy working in a union shop because I am forced to send part of my check to administer the rest of the money they take. I prefer to work alone, mostly, alone. So I understand the allure of thinking ones soul was unique and alone from all the Other souls, yet we have to admit that Soul and soul do look a lot alike. Something there...It's as if one were a pattern for the other. Like a fractal looks like the Milky Way, or the black spots on a cow in a field wanting to get milked.<br /><br />I make no apologies for having borrowed from several sources to construct what I feel helps the whole AHA moment work. For example: you can only see a certain range of light waves and only feel a few more. It's not nearly enough to cover the full spectrum, so how reasonable is it to say you "see" something? Yet we do, and we mostly know what Others mean when they say they See something too. You can wear goggles to see into the infra-red ranges and see things you never saw before. In that universe things can blend together if their heat ranges are the same, if they have empathy for one another you might say. Like a warm sheet and a warm body, they can be said to have blended in a way, into a red-yellow spot. That would be a true vision and would convey a Truth. When we shake hands, or kiss, or slap, or strangle we merge in some level and become one form, maybe several levels.&nbsp; If I had a person whose goggles had been strapped on for some time they would no doubt be having interesting thoughts. Suppose we upped the ante and tossed in ultra-violet? merge the two visions and what would we see then when two people or more touched?<br /><br />Naturally if someone had never heard of nor seen infrared goggles they could not be faulted for not being able to wrap their minds around the idea that at various levels we are all linked as a common Being, the One, and yet we are also capable of, as this Infinite Being Knows, Being in a very small bite of the Cosmic Muffin. The difficulty is when people cannot find it in their hearts to admit they cannot see into the infrared and insist that heat does not "radiate" and there are no fields of amorphous blobs in amazing colors which not only surround us, but which link us to every other living thing, although it would include a lot of what we might call "inanimate" but which a Shinto believer would suggest it had a Soul. Big stones in the sun, for instance would certainly blend into a person's field when near. What does this mean, what lesson does it contain? Don't try to touch a big hot rock.<br /><br />And beyond the Milky Way are other galaxies which do what they do so well, they spin like Dervishes around one another, getting dizzy and losing themselves in the Dance. I too am lost in a dance, in a trance, seeing things which others do not, and don't we All?W.D. Shirleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14961797718073179845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6342131.post-69336522572930658982011-01-21T15:55:00.001-05:002011-01-21T16:17:20.630-05:00On the loss of MemoryVirtually everyone knows about the loss of short term memory. They heard about it when they started smoking weed and when they did other less civilized ways of dealing with short term sexual tension. But then there's Age and it brings with you short term memory loss and immediate memory loss and brief totally fictional memory, i.e.implanted memory... so many ways to lose your way. But, there is a way of memory that you might call the Way of Mid-Term memory loss.<br /><br />We all know how the next breed of humans are not prime material to face a world of competition. But we don't breed humans for the most part, only for sport and never for politics. The thing is you can't judge a buck by his cover.<br /><br />When a blacksmith has in their hand a piece of work so fine, so just no better, they, in the end, are holding iron, metal of some antiquity and a Master of working iron is standing on the shoulders of those who worked bronze. There are books with detailed instructions on the theory and execution of a carburetor producing a dose of gasoline fumes and oxygen in a compressed cylinder while being struck with a spark in the midst. This can move people to want more power over their lives. They may want to move without horses!<br /><br />There was a time when men of some experience would hang out a shingle of wood with a sign showing what they thought they knew. For many real and political reasons the Blacksmith would be found at the edge of town, mostly near a bridge if they had one. A Smith would hang out a sign of an anvil and if another Smith should come around, the newcomer would no doubt have a reason to doubt the first Smith's territory and skill, so he would dispute the first and a competition would occur, a great occasion for&nbsp; folks of all ages. The Smiths would go thru all the usual blacksmith accomplishments and move into the more esoteric, producing more and more complex pieces of work, lances that never dulled and puzzles for the little ones. People would bring in things to repair and sharpen and the meet would go on for hours, perhaps but at some point one Smith would concede defeat and the folk would go home and no doubt the Smiths would go sauna or drink and chat about what was going on here and around here, down that road from which had come the new Blacksmith. Perhaps here he planned to make a stand, to teach the skills of iron, bronze and copper. A Smith could locate ore, smelt and refine the ore using local clays, stone, wood and fire brought from the Smith in a little bowl.<br /><br />Once smelted, the iron, bronze or copper could be shaped by Master Smiths into any shape you could imagine, and any device you could imagine they could build. There were lone Masters who lived apart and repaired odd things and made one-off devices or jewelry. They were harder to find and were almost always very old by the time you did in fact find them and present them with your great-grandfathers mantle clock which no longer chimes or runs. But they took great care handling the clock and looking inside like a sloth counting ants on a hive.<br /><br />Boots were repaired by elves behind closed doors. Everyone knew that. I, myself, have had a pair of excellent leather boots repaired, re-soled by a tiny little man with a thousand nails in his mouth and he Knew what to do. A few days later, a new pair of wonderful, excellent-fitting boots would appear on his counter and you would leave a small offering of odd metal chips for the Master to take home. This was a time when the coins were worth their weight in whatever.<br /><br />So that was the Smith. There was also the Rag Man. He usually had a wooden cart filled with things and a pile of this and that. He did also have a pile of rags which his wife might turn into quality quilts for sale later, or she might repair certain gowns. But things got repaired and delivered and sometimes message, too, if the wagon went a certain way. It was a kind of Facebook, an early Facebook. Now, all Farmers need Smiths sooner or later, just as Astarte needed Vulcan. The Smith and Farmer both needed big families to run the shops and barns and such. In some towns a certain Master might work in fine metals or in glass, and they might catch the attention of locals as having Special skills<br /><br />Gardener was a Son of Farmer, and he worked very hard or sometimes She worked very hard at growing herbs and spices and oils, infusions, rubs, and decompression techniques for the overworked. She lived on the outskirts of Town, which is where two roads came to-gather. And roads were named from roods, or reeds, which is what the Sumerians used as a unit of measurement of distance, ala along a road.&nbsp; Where is your Smith today?<br /><br />Most of our society will argue away the Smiths and the tinsmith and the Herbalist or Hedge-witch or all those mid range Masters who would hang out a shingle so people knew who to go to if something needed help.<br /><br />Now, hold onto this thought: You don't know any tailors, so you cannot clothe yourself. You do not know a Blacksmith, so you cannot have tools made to work your trade. You cannot heal when you need it, and when things go wrong, as they often do, you only "know" the Yellow Pages. As we got rid of all the Masters who were not familiar enough to ply their trades locally, we could do with some one with a big dog to watch over our sacks of wheat and rye and taters and onions etc what makes up a society. We have no muzzled or not monster to slow down the would-be sackers of humanity.<br /><br />Mercury was a Messenger, trusty-worthy or not, He was it for getting the word out. There were people hanging out around banks and barbers to take the occasional message for the occasional chip of copper, a common metal. These might be Mercury!&nbsp; But he got the job done and he did not form gangs with inappropriate tattoos on their necks and faces. They did not go cutting off peoples heads. Among themselves they told tall tales about their messages and their travels and they argued about which was the greatest, fastest, most cool messenger of all times. Now nobody needs someone to take a message without stopping, just get it to this person and there's a piece of silver for you if you get it there by the tenth bell. Without all these half-starved kids running all over town with notes they could not read we would not now have the hydrogen bomb!<br /><br />Suppose every small hydro-dam generator looked like an ancient crumbled mill? would that satisfy the People? Think of it... you are riding down Main Street in a two pony cart and your driver gave the Boy to run ahead and tell Granny you were coming! O! What a lovely day- 2025 AD! If we wanted it to be...But we probably won't want all that humming so close to our bedrooms, so I guess not. Frankenstein did it, the Doctor, not the monster. But not new York City, for all it's watery options.<br /><br />Who needs a tinker when all we have is un-repairable? Who needs a Rat-Boy or a Messenger, or a Flower-Girl, a basket-weaver, a Miller? When our Apple juice and Chicken jerky dog treats comes from China dare we ask where our eggs and flour have come from? Who maintains the quality? We have been told there isn't any money for all of that, just enough money to hire enough Thugs to collect the taxes. Not enough to heal the sick or educate the illiterate, just enough for Power to apply to the masses. and In the process the Smiths have vanished, the Barber is gone and there are no Potters or Bone-Setters either. We are on our own.<br /><br />You can design a house in your head, or maybe a room, but you cannot think of what the house down the road has to do with the house you want to live in. But is it upstream or down, does it shade your land or not, and in a pinch does the person living there like you enough to give you shelter if you Needed it?<br /><br />Do you know who in the neighborhood knows CPR, to put a modern spin on things? Do we even know the occupations of our neighbors' neighbor? Not much of a neighborhood, but a start. Who knows how to make bricks? who knows how to make glass? who knows how to grow food?, who knows how to drill wells? But we can go to the moon...or can we? The Saturn V booster is the greatest strongest machine we ever built and yet the last one is rotting on the ground because we don't do that any more. We don't build hydrogen blimps anymore either. We don't bend wood into a circle so we can roll our asses across the ground instead of walking!<br /><br />The loss of a key element can set a society back generations. The less we know, the less we can go.W.D. Shirleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14961797718073179845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6342131.post-80093298616492451242011-01-17T08:30:00.000-05:002011-01-17T08:30:36.682-05:00Studio Views<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_QVkl96gIADA/TTRBZ14dNJI/AAAAAAAAJgg/BJ1XCJlE1PE/s1600/IMG_5017.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_QVkl96gIADA/TTRBZ14dNJI/AAAAAAAAJgg/BJ1XCJlE1PE/s320/IMG_5017.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>In the winter when the snow is about two feet thick and it's almost into the negative temps, I often stop off at the studio, after closing the hen house, and fire up the propane heater so the room gets more tolerable. You can't work frozen clay and glue does not flow at 2 F, but pencils work and I can rearrange sculptures and look at things a new way. Before it got very cold I was able to tear apart pine cones and glue the shingles on my bird houses. Hope to sell some in the spring. The other things, the nearly abstracted objects and rearranged stuff, I try to see old things as new. So I get some roots and objects and stack them up and stir them up and stare at them awhile until I have a neat little vision of what might be.<br /><br />The Green man face is mounted onto a honeysuckle clump and pine cones are stuffed here and there to produce an amalgam of images, flowing into one another and writhing in your mind. I doubt I will show this one. Years ago I obtained part of a hat form and it sits in the studio waiting. I took "The Nurse" mask and mounted it on the form to see if it might be good for posing masks for studio pics. Now I am looking at and wondering about what this means. In anthropology they tend to declare objects are religious artifacts if they don't know what it means. So if my sculptures are religious, in what way? So I study my own work to see if I can figure out what kind of societal purpose they might have had if I had found them in a ruin. Funny way to look at one's own work, but it makes things old somewhat new again.<br /><br />Sticks and stones and white tail bones, antlers, branches and string. What can we do with this old leather shoe and what will the spring time bring?W.D. Shirleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14961797718073179845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6342131.post-20325965280849404832011-01-14T15:20:00.000-05:002011-01-14T15:20:00.290-05:00Once You KnowOnce you know, once it really sinks in, you don't move for a moment, and then you just straighten up. You want to face this head on. Cats can both hold objects with their paws, but they can also sell them on eBay! This is what Wrigley had been trying to say. <br /><br />Suppose, and this is just "suppose', there were ways for thinking entities somewhere "else" to affect things here? Suppose limes were just lemons who in another dimension were not yet ripe? Suppose except for avocados NO fruit got green when ripe? Oh yeah, I know what you are thinking, sure and what about beans? But beans are always and forever Veggies, or vegetables, because they are all kinds of colors anyway. I myself grow purple green beans... or red streaked white beans. never could get lima beans to grow much. Too much rain I suspect, at the wrong time. But I digress.<br /><br /><br />Obviously if invisible beings permeated the atmosphere we'd feel them if we couldn't see them. And yet we do feel something in the air, something cold coming down from the north... and when Uncle Heath dies in January from the Grippe, does anyone not think it was bad spirits which took him? Unless, of course, you have enough money to have professional Undertakers to relieve you of that Burden which Fate has cast aside... like his jacket and his wallet and his, oh yeah- his body. But say it ain't as bad as those Indians who burn their loved ones on the banks of a sacred river and then cast the ashes into the waters! Better to contaminate the Los Angel's water shed and leave the Ganges for the downstream rice farmers. But we still shit off our skin cells after death and so our bladders, and so our brains, no doubt, but I swear by Erda before me I will go out as befits a Great Ape, noisily; thus making damn sure I attract the attention of a Chaos god...no...no, that's in that computer game I play. No Chaos Gods here. Everything makes some kind of sense, unless you get distracted, and then none of it makes sense. Life is like talking to Abbot and Costello and You are on second base.W.D. Shirleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14961797718073179845noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6342131.post-24833040602602363162010-12-24T09:24:00.000-05:002010-12-24T09:24:25.082-05:00A Question of Morals<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_QVkl96gIADA/SWv4mek9IWI/AAAAAAAADDg/2HLdv2OV770/s1600/IMG_0222.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_QVkl96gIADA/SWv4mek9IWI/AAAAAAAADDg/2HLdv2OV770/s320/IMG_0222.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>Recently I found myself being "friends" in Facebook with people who, like myself, are caring for a person with TBI. Brain injuries can unite some very disparate peoples, as in this case. But the real world is a funny place. I enjoy learning basic skills, like surviving in the woods, building fires, making knives etc, so when I encountered this family and their friends I was pretty pleased. They hunted with black powder guns, hand ground the meat and made sausages and smoked meat... pretty cool stuff. Then the "xmas" holidays came in and things changed. Yesterday morning one of the members of the extended family decided to post a comment which ran something like this: "All morals come from God (YHWH) and if you don't believe in God and Jesus you can't have any morals." It's hard to sit still for this so I wrote a quick, polite response wherein I declared that I am not a Christian but that I thought I was a moral person; I don't lie, cheat, steal, hurt people, I honor my parents, I am a devoted friend and I am also a devout pagan. So this gentleman replied with essentially this: "If you don't believe in God you cannot have any morals because all morals come from Him." Well I am also something of a logician and I find it hard to listen to bigotry, illogical arguments, circular thinking and lies. I happen to have a pretty good grasp of where YHWHism comes from and it's history, which is not very moral&nbsp; by our current standards. Read the text! We have lies, murders, rapes, incest... all of this by the good guys! The bad guys seem to be getting killed off not because of their actions, but their very existence. People were slaughtered simply because all their lives they lived in a land that the YHWHists desired. So they took the land, killed the men, raped the women and sold the children into slavery for the sin of existing. This is an example of "morals" in the YHWH world. Again, read the text.<br /><br />Now, the person who insulted several billion people with his simplistic world view must have a set of values which comprise his moral dimension. Probably things like murder, rape, stealing, lying are all included, but if you asked him about the lands the YHWHists stole violently with many innocent deaths he will say that the Lord gave the land to the Jews and that's the final word on that. Apparently their deity is outside of the moral universe, and by "trickle down" the followers are also de-facto moral people no matter what they do, so long as it does not involve worshiping other deities. I follow a different path, ergo I am immoral no matter what I do. It's a curiously circular form of thinking and it allows someone who is not a very nice person, like Dick Cheney, to get away with mass murder simply by praying in a Christian church. Amazing.<br /><br />But what about the billions of people who live away from the Middle East and never heard of the Jews, never heard of Yeshua and yet conduct themselves in a moral environment with respect for the rights of others and a respect for the life of the land? They apparently are in a no-win situation. They cannot be moral because they never read the Bible and never were dunked or something by a priest. Back in AZ I had a similar situation wherein a Christian was lecturing me on my paganism and how I was doomed to Hell. I suggested that a person could live a moral life, a good life, without ever hearing of the Ten Commandments. Alas, he could not hear of this. A Pagan was by definition an immoral and bad person. Around this time was the Jim Jones incident and being a bug, I mentioned the Bibles old Jim Jones read from while he pouring poison into the kool-aid. Not a great idea. Jones was an evil man ruled by Satan, but of course it was years before they figured this out, prior to that he was a holy man preaching the Lord's words. Then he killed everybody. My point was that I did not kill people, did not steal from people, did not lie to people and so I had a shot at being "moral". Nope, not so, impossible. Nobody who follows the Goddess can be seen as moral, and no matter what I did or said I would always be a lost soul, an immoral man and doomed to Hell because I did not worship the Jewish god YHWH. This sort of thing always puts a bug up my ass.<br /><br />My pagan faith has one commandment and there is no direct punishment for failing to obey that commandment. It is, "If it harms none, do what you will." Pretty basic foundation for a decent set of morals, I think. So I can study the Bible, I can study the Koran, I can study Wicca, and so forth, so long as I am harming no one. I cannot steal because it harms, I cannot murder for the same reason. I cannot go to war, I am faithful to my wife and my family. But I do so out of a sense of responsibility to myself because you cannot be loved if you do not love others. I want people in my family to be able to love me, so I follow the Pagan Way and try to harm nobody in the process. Now if we study the history of Judaism, Christianity and other related faiths we see a disturbing pattern of violating all the commandments when it suits them. Christians dropped the nuclear bombs that decimated two entire cities filled with old people, men, women, children, pets and even Allied POWs! We knew all those people were there, the POWs were less than a half mile from the target zone. Apparently we wanted to be sure to vaporize them. Well, we did, and to this day we refuse to offer any assistance to those people suffering from radiation induced abnormalities, birth defects and cancers. We do nothing to help the sick, nothing to help the broken children. This from a Christian nation which even now is fighting, trying to get the Bible into all the classrooms. No Pagan could vaporize and irradiate a city, it is such a crime against Nature that no one who believes in Life could handle the guilt. But Christians not only can handle it, they worked to make sure it could happen again. We now own enough nuclear death to kill every major city on Earth, all built and designed by Christians. Prove me wrong.<br /><br />This man who has judged me as immoral and inferior goes out to kill deer and other forms of life. He never considers the soul of the animal, as would a pagan. He never prays forgiveness to the animal he is about to kill, and he will pray to his God for allowing his bullet or arrow to find it's mark. No thanks to the unlucky deer. This seems twisted to me, but his God is a micro-manager who inserts His way into every detail of life, except sometimes. Like when a crazy man rapes and murders a little girl, apparently YHWH is not there to help her. He certainly would not be there to help a Pagan girl. In Iraq a number of Christian Marines raped and murdered a 14 year old Muslim girl and then murdered her family. Then they burned down the house to destroy the bodies and went back to play pool and prepare for the next day of occupation and slaughter of civilians. I find this hard to understand,&nbsp; but it seems it is okay to do this to a non-Christian because their souls are lost anyway. Like Joshua entering those cities to rape and murder, with a holy Get Out of Hell Free card.<br /><br />I encourage every Pagan to read the Bible, as many translations as you can. Read the Koran translations, too, because fundamentalist Muslims are as bad as Christians in twisting a tale of Peace into a tale of Slaughter. It's important to understand the kind of thinking that goes into these faiths because many people are stuck in them, trying to be good people but having to reconcile the various stories with the various Commandments. How does one wage war if Thou Shall Not Kill? I suppose you could use paintballs, but they don't. They seem to like real weapons better. In comparative religion we find many stories of one faith fighting another. Muslims today are killing Muslims over a political dispute almost 1000 years old. Jews are still killing cities filled with Palestinians and occupying their lands, bulldozing down the ancient olive groves and poisoning the wells. We have not gotten very far following YHWH and His derivatives. Pagans seem to be doing a bit better, being more than willing to adopt science as a means of further understanding the Deity, our Goddess. Ecological movements are based firmly in the Pagan principles of harming none, taking care of the Earth. The name of this planet is derived from one of the names of the Goddess, Urda. Our days are named after Pagan gods and goddesses. Our months are named after Pagan deities and Roman dictators. Our life is rich in Pagan traditions because in part the YHWHists stole even those and twisted them to connect with the YHWH faith. Easter comes to mind, as does Christmas, both Pagan holy days twisted into YHWH's holy days, but the spring Goddess was so important to the masses that they kept Her name for that Holy Day. I'm thinking hypocrisy here.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_QVkl96gIADA/SWv4mek9IWI/AAAAAAAADDg/2HLdv2OV770/s1600/IMG_0222.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><br /></a></div>I guess if that Christian would consider reading this I would like him to come away with the idea that all faiths have hypocrites and power mongers and politics can soil any garment. A moral person is not moral out of fear, but out of love for their fellow humans and the life that surrounds us. This does not require ell fires or homicidal Deities tossing fire and brimstone. What Yeshua was teaching, apparently, and what got him in hot water with the Priests, was incredibly similar to what the Pagan faiths convey: "Harm none." He did not think that giving offerings were enough, that helping humanity was more important, and that cut into the Temple's wealth, so he had to go. It was not Pagans who turned him in and demanded he be killed, it was YHWHists. The Romans killed him because his followers were promoting him as their King, and their Emperor did not allow that, so the leader of the cult had to be removed for treason. Simple politics, nothing to do with religion.<br /><br />So, looking back on things, I have to say that regardless of how effective I am at it, I strive to be a moral person. I try not to be too judgmental and I try to be more helpful. This is not good enough for my judging friends in the YHWH camp. But it seems to be good enough for my Lady of Life and since She gave birth to the Lord of Light I suppose it's good enough for me. Like the YHWH and Yeshua cults, the followers don't always get it right, or maybe they get it too Right and their minds explode. One thing I do know for sure is that unlike Her consort and son, YHWH, the Goddess will accept each and every one of us upon our deaths. She will hold us and love us and return us to life in due Time and that is something that works for me.W.D. Shirleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14961797718073179845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6342131.post-55256949677701992752010-12-22T13:03:00.000-05:002010-12-22T13:03:53.234-05:00Waking the WitchI had a dream the other night, when everything stood still. I thought I heard King Arthur, a-comin' down the hill. A buckwheat cake was in his mouth and a tear was in his eye, but his true nature became clear when the babies came to cry. Their hungers was aflame with need, their arms were whisper thin, I thought I saw King Arthur, not once but thrice again.<br /><br />People understand, but animals believe. There was no way to stop the wren from shitting on my sleeve. A buckwheat cake was in his mouth or so the label said, but what was running thru his veins was nowhere near true red.<br /><br />He compulsively wipes his hands across his beard, wiping away this feeling he had, this thin skin of hydrocarbons. It's just another skin, one of many. He sniffs it anyway, hands it to his Dog and He sniffs it and falls asleep, farting without sound. The Dog can do with yoga what other men talk about online.W.D. Shirleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14961797718073179845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6342131.post-91531544104718432362010-12-22T11:10:00.000-05:002010-12-22T11:10:31.038-05:00Hudson River Valley-Winter<div style="margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_QVkl96gIADA/TRIg04lf0GI/AAAAAAAAJbk/ZEgGdOOeACY/s1600/IMG_4829.JPG"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_QVkl96gIADA/TRIg04lf0GI/AAAAAAAAJbk/ZEgGdOOeACY/s320/IMG_4829.JPG" /></a> </div><div style="clear: both; text-align: left;">This morning we missed the bus for work and I had to drive down to Albany. Margaret made it to work and Wrigley and I met a nice man and his dog in Washington Park. It was cold and both dogs seemed determined to smell each other for many more minutes than my poor fingers could stand. We bid a "Happy Holidays" to one another and Wrigley and I trotted back to the car. I decided to take the old River Road, Rte 4 because after a really cold night you sometimes see some fantastic ice below Schuylerville. Sure enough, when we got to the gate to the Saratoga Battle Grounds we started seeing geese flying in and out of the river. I parked the car and trekked in to the riverside. Thousands of Canadian Geese were sitting, standing and flying on the river. It was a study in grey scale. I took about 50 photos of the geese and the river and turned back to the car where Wrigley no doubt napped. As I crunched through the flooded field I started noting the patterns in the layers of ice. Then I saw this scene and snapped it. I am reminded of a frozen rice paddy somewhere south of Kyoto.</div>W.D. Shirleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14961797718073179845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6342131.post-74182533595426980832010-12-06T09:16:00.000-05:002010-12-06T09:16:19.299-05:00Quoting WillI am finding lately that more than ads for Russian porn sites I am also getting legit comments from people wanting to "back link" or otherwise share my blog. I have no problem with that, in fact I tried to put up a note to that effect. As far as I am concerned my thoughts are free. One problem has been that they leave their notes with no way to contact them, they sign "Anonymous" and that limits me to 6 billion other people. So if you leave such a note, you find my thoughts interesting enough to share, then by all means drop me an email or something.<br /><br />I am thinking about suing for my son's body. No, he's not dead but he's not officially alive either. They have moved his prognosis into "permanent vegetative state". I would like to point out that the AMA says this is a non-starter. There is nowhere to go from that point except to wait for death. That will not do, not for my boy! I insist they declare what they intend to do if my son continues to live but not respond to them. He responds to me, slight movements, slight expressions, a small smile. I'll take it. I think he's in there, floating in a white fog and occasionally floating by the windows of his soul and spotting old Dad sitting there holding his hand. What else can I do?<br /><br />I am thinking about suing for my son's body to be returned to a hospital nearby so I can begin the wake. Oh, the heart beats and the lungs work and he is said to be in pain once in awhile, but they give him Oxycontin to ease his pain. Yet, how can a vegetable feel anything? The fact is they give him pain to lessen his suffering, and how can a vegetable suffer? They're trying to have it both ways and that won't do. If he is suffering, then he is self aware, yes? If he is self aware he is not a vegetable, no? So a non-vegetable gets therapy and the non-vegetable may take up time and resources that are wearing thin these days in NY. So they want it both ways. they want him dead and alive. Dead, he causes no trouble. Alive, he counts as a warm body for reimbursement by Medicare. If I take him away they get less money. So I am thinking about suing for my son's body. What else can I do?W.D. Shirleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14961797718073179845noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6342131.post-9225345407414250582010-12-04T07:53:00.000-05:002010-12-04T07:53:23.184-05:00ShipwreckAs the rest of the ship broke apart<br />&nbsp;&nbsp; and the other victims sank<br />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; --out of sight--<br />The Lady drifted<br />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; for awhile<br />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; at that level<br />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Looking up.<br />Her gown fluttered about her<br />showing nothing<br />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; anymore<br />Then, as by some<br />&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; unseen signal<br />She sank<br />and became<br />food for thought.W.D. Shirleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14961797718073179845noreply@blogger.com0